(General Feedback)

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I've been hit several times by outages recently. Well at least I think I was - I can't actually tell for sure whether the issues that I'm facing were due to the particular outage. The information on the status pages is often insufficient to be able to determine the impact of an outage.

If something was down, tell me what was down. Tell me why. Link to a proper document of the cause / effect.

Here is a real situation that is not well covered by the current Azure Scheduler.

I am writing an application that deals with weekly selective lotteries (lotteries where you select n number from m). Typically the draw of this type lottery happen once or twice a week. My application monitors absolutely all the existing lotteries in a given country. It will cover the countries of US and Canada initially. The type of lottery I am talking about is managed at the state level (province level in Canada). The US has 50 states and Canada has 10 province. Each state or province has 2 or 3 of these types of lotteries. My application will still cover ALL the lotteries in the US and Canada.

All I want is to program the recurring date-time of the draw of a lottery and to activate a job.

Let's do the math of the number of lottery types I am dealing with.

We have 60 states (50 US state +10 Canada) X 3 (number of lottery types per state) = 180 lottery types

Each lottery type has its own draw schedule. I would need to create 180 Azure Scheduler for each lottery type. That seems excessive and unrealistic (outrageous cost!) because the job that needs triggering is almost the same in all cases. It differs only by the identification of the lottery type (i.e. the id of the schedule).

What my application really need is for Azure Scheduler to handle the case of many schedulers (many CRON expressions) with only one job. When the job is triggered, an id or index of the schedule (the CRON expression) that caused the trigger is passed to the job as parameter or in some context structure.

My application should only have to create one single Azure Scheduler that can handle many schedules to a single job.

I am sure that this is a very common case for many application. It would be a wonderful improvement.

Here is a real situation that is not well covered by the current Azure Scheduler.

I am writing an application that deals with weekly selective lotteries (lotteries where you select n number from m). Typically the draw of this type lottery happen once or twice a week. My application monitors absolutely all the existing lotteries in a given country. It will cover the countries of US and Canada initially. The type of lottery I am talking about is managed at the state level (province level in Canada). The US has 50 states and Canada has 10 province. Each state or…

Thank you for your feedback. A Scheduler job is defined as an Action with a scheduled recurrence. If you want an action to fire at multiple different schedules then you would need multiple jobs. That being said, it is possible to create a complex schedule on a job that may satisfy your needs. For example, if you have a lottery drawing that occurs twice a week on Monday and Friday at 10:00pm you can create a single complex schedule that would fire at those times.
Also note that you can create up to 500 Standard jobs before exceeding a single Standard unit cost of $13.99.

I'm IT Professional, I'd like to use Windows Azure for studying and testing purposes: as private person, this helps me to increase my knowledge on Microsoft Cloud Platform. I already used Trial Period but it isn't enough. I'm asking if there is a way to pay little fixed yearly fee for this purpose only ?

Get-AzureCertificate and Remove-AzureCertificate should be augmented to allow me to remove all certificates matching a regex on their CN name. I can only do this through the management portal one at a time since I can see the Subject field in the UI, but the Powershell cmdlets don't expose the Subject field in the requests or responses to allow me to automate this in bulk.

Notification mails for service usage going out of limits defined in the Azure backend (like cache hit rates for example) are send with alerts-noreply@mail.windowsazure.com as sender address.

The domain mail.windowsazure.com is not valid because it can not be resolved to do validity checks by mail filtering software. As a result the notification emails are blocked at all mailservers that do not allow unknown sender domains and also do not have a whitelist for exceptions.

Also for the same reason no SPF record for this domain exist but does exist for other Microsoft domains sending mail and SPF is explicitly supported by microsoft.

The two combined lead to unnessary administration overhead because the mailservers can not find automatically out who is allowed to send mails for mail.windowsazure.com.

Notification mails for service usage going out of limits defined in the Azure backend (like cache hit rates for example) are send with alerts-noreply@mail.windowsazure.com as sender address.

The domain mail.windowsazure.com is not valid because it can not be resolved to do validity checks by mail filtering software. As a result the notification emails are blocked at all mailservers that do not allow unknown sender domains and also do not have a whitelist for exceptions.

Also for the same reason no SPF record for this domain exist but does exist for other Microsoft domains sending mail and SPF is explicitly supported…

The Azure store tries to help by showing prices in UYU (Uruguayan Peso) which is our local currency but it would be preferable to see prices in USD or to be able to select or specify in my profile the currency I want to see and be charged in.

Also, it does not make sense to be charged by Azure only in USD (which is what I actually want) and at the same time see price in the store in a different currency

You should make this process easier or you will likely lose a lot of would be customers. You should offer the ability to renew an expired subscription to a pay as you go plan once the free trial period expires (or really I think for any expired subscription). I was shocked to find that because I got busy the day my plan expired I had to contact support to get it renewed the next day (which they responded in 12 hours and had it renewed for me, which is great but shouldn't have had to log a support ticket for this). For getting initial customers in the door you should allow for renewal view the subscriptions screen (or someway to transfer all existing Azure services to another subscription). This wastes time for the customer and support staff.

You should make this process easier or you will likely lose a lot of would be customers. You should offer the ability to renew an expired subscription to a pay as you go plan once the free trial period expires (or really I think for any expired subscription). I was shocked to find that because I got busy the day my plan expired I had to contact support to get it renewed the next day (which they responded in 12 hours and had it renewed for me, which is great but shouldn't have had to log a support ticket for…

Some Azure users' primary emails would not be Microsoft emails such as abc@outlook.com. If there are important updates such as planned maintenance announcements, it is friendly for Azure to send them to the Azure users' primary emails.

Would you consider you to consider gathering alternative emails of Azure users and then send important emails to both Microsoft emails and alternative emails.

I can not get into the "old" Azure web portal using IE11, although I can get into the new one...which isn't nearly as useful. I can get in using Firefox, no problem. This is true whether I'm connected to corpnet or RAS'd in from my offsite office

Offer Platform support to everyone. With cloud you are really abstracting the hardware, enterprise customers are used to hardware manufacturer support. If its a platform issue or a assistance to use the platform better then support should be included with all subscriptions. Cloud adopters need more than billing support. More support, better adoption.

Without warning, the directory that contains the items that Microsoft Azure Online Backup is supposed to be backing up, stopped. It appears that they stopped backing up on September 29th, 2014, they also refused to be manually backed up. I uninstalled the agent and downloaded a fresh copy from the Azure Portal. Once installed, I:
Ran the "Register Server Wizard"
Skipped past the "Proxy Configuration" screen
Downloaded my vault credentials from the Recovery Services node
Clicked "Browse" in the Register Server Wizard
Selected the file

Ahhh! This was the second time this has happened to me, and I bet others who are 3rd party developers have had this happen ...

You setup a trial account for a client on a new Outlook account that you setup for the client. You happily go about setting up their Azure services, programming websites, etc. Meanwhile, MS is sending warning messages to the Outlook account about the impending cancellation of the account when the free trial ends. You never get these, because the account is for the client and you don't really check it.

I **highly** recommend either of the following:

1. Give us a "Technical Contact" field for Azure subscriptions so that we can put in a different E-mail address than the main Outlook account used to create the Azure subscription. Send a copy of all of the warning messages about the free account getting cancelled at the end of the trial period to the Technical Contact, too. That way, the dev who setup the account can stay abreast of when you plan to cancel it and can take action before the account dies.

--OR--

2. Allow us to setup new Azure accounts with a switch for "Automatically convert to paid when free trail ends." That would be even better, since we're just trying to take advantage of some free service time before our clients go into a paid subscription.

Either of these would save us some headaches and save MS having a customer support ticket opened. But thank goodness for guru Azure Support Engineers like Anees Palayakodan at Spectrum Consultants who can switch a cancelled trial to paid in minutes.

Ahhh! This was the second time this has happened to me, and I bet others who are 3rd party developers have had this happen ...

You setup a trial account for a client on a new Outlook account that you setup for the client. You happily go about setting up their Azure services, programming websites, etc. Meanwhile, MS is sending warning messages to the Outlook account about the impending cancellation of the account when the free trial ends. You never get these, because the account is for the client and you don't really check it.

It's called 1) communication and 2) following up on promises.
Azure staff should be trained in providing customer service. Whoever called me yesterday acting bored out of their mind when I asked a question about which edition of SQL Server I needed for BizTalk.
He said he'd send me an email which I never got.